Assistant Editor Maggie Su: It’s an old question: How do you teach creative writing? For writers and writing professors, the tired debate between nature versus nurture, one side championing innate genius and the other reducing the writing act to a formula, ends with most agreeing that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. What makes Marilyn Abildskov’s “Confetti,” published in our Issue 16.1 (read an excerpt here) so refreshing is its ability to sidestep this question. It’s an essay on teaching that deemphasizes the craft of writing. Instead of focusing on how, her essay delves into that which often goes unnamed in workshops: What do we write about?
In “Confetti,” the speaker catalogues the anonymous freewriting responses of her creative-writing students throughout the course of the semester. For the first prompt, the instructions are simple: “Write down what you are thinking. You can make something out of this, I tell them.” The students’ answers to the questions are in turn trivial and existential, funny and self-loathing:
They are thinking about work, sex, lunch, planes.
Pumpkin spice lattes.
This terrible heat.
They are thinking about how profound the mundane can be.
There’s an intimacy to reading the anonymous snippets—it feels like eavesdropping, getting brief glimpses into the lives of nineteen- and twenty-year-old undergraduates. Abildskov’s speaker allows the reader to fully absorb the different voices. She doesn’t judge individual responses or twist them into clear-cut analogies. She lists the responses as deadpan as when she describes the passing of time or the weather: “It’s the end of October, Halloween, a Friday afternoon, raining.”
As the semester progresses, the teacher’s prompts become more personal. She asks her students to list their identities, their fears and ghosts, the things they’ve learned. In the last pages, the speaker admits her own reluctance to make meaning of their responses: “I read their lessons and think how suspicious I am of that word, lessons, how the notion of it gives me hives.” In the end, both the students’ lessons and the essay’s lesson resist reductive truisms. What’s clear in the essay is the speaker’s belief that the writing toolbox extends beyond traditional notions of craft and that teaching takes place beyond the level of plotting and character development. Something vital happens when writing instructors let go of the impulse to teach and give students permission and space to excavate their ghosts. The real lessons occur when randomness is allowed into the classroom and unconscious emotions and fears can rise to the surface. It’s this accumulation of what the speaker calls “slivers of written-down lives, the notes, the practicing, which is, it turns out, not adjacent to but center stage.”
